MATRIARCHY. Tales are still told of villages (always outside the ken of the narrator) where only women dwell, whose population is maintained by the admission annually of one male who is put to death when his procreative task is done. Did such exist, therein might be found that combination of female dom inance, female kinship, female inheritance which (strictly speak ing) alone constitutes matriarchy or the rule of the mothers. Again there are communities the bulk of whose adult male popu lation departs periodically to engage in some seasonal industry elsewhere. There the women form a permanent element in the social and economic order, but though in a degree matripotestal, these communities are in many instances patrilineal and the authority of the males is the ultimate basis.
Matriliny, however, the custom of reckoning kinship, descent, succession and inheritance in the female line, still survives in various parts of the world. In Aus tralia it is associated with a simple dual system. It is found in Sumatra, in Micronesia and Melanesia, again along with the dual organization. The primitive folk in Formosa have it. India has it in Assam among the Garos, again with a dual organization, and the Khasias. On the Malabar coast are matrilineal groups, and there are Brahmans whose succession is designated by maru makathayyam—of the sister's son, a feature of the matrilineal order. The Nairs, a warrior community who once practised polyandry, are matrilineal. It still survives in Africa about Lake Nyasa, among the Ila speaking peoples of Northern Rhodesia, in Ashanti, among lower groups in Dahomey, on the Gold and Ivory Coasts. The Iroquois in North America were matrilineal, and in their polity women played an important part—in the selection and dismissal of chiefs. It is found among many Indian tribes. (See L. Morgan, Ancient Society.) Locality.—Sometimes the group is matrilineal but patrilocal, as in Africa where the wives settle in their husbands' villages. Elsewhere, as among the Khasias, the group is matrilineal and matrilocal, the husband living in his wife's village. That the locality of marriage affects the social order profoundly, needs no elaborate proof. In those cases where marriage is matrilocal and kinship is matrilineal, the wife's kin form a definite local group, ready and able to exert supreme authority in cases of con flict, but the husband, the father, has a meed of respect in the family and in his wife's community. Every social system contains both the seeds of conflict, and devices for dealing with them as and when they may arise. In matrilineal societies where patri locality prevails, the women as in Africa have evolved organiza tions on the basis of sex solidarity—secret societies (q.v.).
Many customs have been interpreted as survivals of a former matrilineal order, such as the important social func tions discharged by the maternal uncle in initiation rites, at birth, marriage and death (see AVUNCULATE). Some at least are compat ible with a patrilineal system in which cross-cousin marriage was appreciated for its economic and social advantages. Here and
there women are selected as priestesses, ministrants to divine beings, sometimes by reason of the demand of a male deity for a female servant—more often, by reason of the special psychologi cal characteristics of her sex. But that may and does happen, consistently enough, in sternly patripotestal communities.
From the time of Bachofen whose work on Mutterrecht was the first scientific attack on the problem, stu dents of social theory have been tempted to see in the matri lineal system, the primitive form of society because "paternity was a matter of inference as opposed to maternity which is a matter of observation" (Maine, Early Law and Custom). They pointed to cases of polyandry where paternity was uncertain but laid stress on the patrilineal order of the Tibetans and Todas where paternal polyandry prevails. Ideas such as these survive, revive, die down only to reappear, sometimes reinforced by a parade of biological, psychological and sentimental argument adorned by a wealth of illustration garnered from China to Peru, which ignores the verdict of modern anthropological research that "in all parts of the world we find maternal kinship side by side with institutions of paternal authority," and "in all the matters in which the father and the mother are vitally essential to the child, kinship has to be counted on both sides." (Malinow ski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society.) The family is a con tinuous instrument essential for the transmission of culture, and human society as we now know it, and as the earliest records of humanity portray it, is a cultural phenomenon, and the family is always a bilateral unit. It is true that everywhere descent, succession and inheritance are determined unilaterally, either by matrilineal or patrilineal reckoning, but it is also true that some of the elements which compose status in the most marked matrilineal society are due to paternality. Speculation may lay stress on the assumed priority of matriliny, though the uni linear theory of social evolution has long been discarded. So keen a mind as that of Maine never imagined that "any amount of evidence of law or usage, written or observed, would by itself solve the problems which cluster round the beginnings of human society," and Darwin, leader of a host of profound biological thinkers, declared firmly for the conclusion proffered by the latest expert critic that "the hypothesis according to which promiscuity has formed a general stage in the social history of mankind is one of the most unscientific ever set forth within the whole domain of sociological speculation." (Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, 5th ed.) From promiscuity through matri archy to patriarchy was the scheme proposed. The family (the bilateral unit) exists always, everywhere, and motherhood and fatherhood are nowhere independent, exempt from the pressure of reciprocity, the primeval principle of social organization.